Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

On Monday June 29 KUSP will make some adjustments to our weekday broadcast schedule. These are the first changes that are consequences of our work to re-envision KUSP and adjust to the economic realities brought on by the end of our efforts to find partner stations with whom we could work to further our mission.

The back story behind our visioning process is on-line at kusp.org/participate – so there’s lots of related information to see over there. On this blog I’ll just review the programming changes you can expect.

The most significant change for many listeners will be the end of our broadcasts of , produced by American Public Media, or APM. KUSP has been a Marketplace station since 2008. You’ve heard their coverage of business and the economy weekday afternoons and also as part of Morning Edition.

We are discontinuing Marketplace on KUSP in order to reduce programming costs; on a minute-by-minute basis it is one of the most expensive programs KUSP acquires. Over the summer, as we finalize our new vision for KUSP, we will save thousands of dollars by not broadcasting Marketplace and extending All Things Considered (which will now air from 3:00 PM until 6:00 PM).

The way public radio programs are priced for local stations by distributors such as NPR and APM is very complicated, and not consistent from one program to the next. Depending on what we find as we complete our visioning and planning, Marketplace might return to KUSP later on.

We are also making a change in our early morning schedule. Morning Edition from NPR News will start at 4:00 AM, instead of 3:00. At 3:00 we will bring you , from the BBC World Service. Hosted by Ros Adkins, one of the BBC’s best known and most respected presenters, Outside Source is a live round-up of breaking world news and is a little different in style from the more traditional news presentation of World Update, which continues on KUSP and will precede Outside Source at 2:00 AM. If your day starts early, the combination of World Update, Outside Source, and Morning Edition will give you an unmatched range of perspectives on the news.

Let me close by noting two other recent changes to what you hear on KUSP. After ten years, Kelly O’Brien has retired her twice-weekly feature on transportation, energy, and sustainability – Life in the Fast Lane. Kelly is a small business owner, a community leader, and volunteers as President of KUSP’s Board of Directors. These other commitments – especially her volunteer leadership role at our station – have made it impossible for her to devote the time Life in the Fast Lane needs. We’re sorry to see the program go, but very happy she’s continuing as part of the station leadership as we work through our planning and transition. The archive of Life in the Fast Lane programs will continue to be available at kusp.org.

Also, we are bidding farewell to Dylan Music, whose voice is familiar to regular listeners to KUSP’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Dylan has been part of our announcing staff since 2011. He leaves KUSP to take over from David Wittrock as the regular host of Morning Edition on KAZU, and we wish Dylan well in this next phase of his public radio career.

We are proud to announce that the Radio-Television-Digital News Association has honored kusp.org as the best broadcast-related web site in our region and market size. This is the second consecutive year we’ve been so recognized, and I want to congratulate everyone at KUSP who contributed to this accomplishment — in particular, Steve Laufer, who is our director of digital content, and J.D. Hillard, who is our producer for news/talk/information programming.

The strength of public radio news in the Monterey Bay area was demonstrated in this year’s competition, which drew over 4,200 entries in all categories. In addition to our award, KAZU received four Murrow Awards in 2015 — for continuing coverage, feature reporting, news series, and sports reporting. Combined, KAZU and KUSP won the majority of small market radio Murrow Awards presented in the region, which includes California, Nevada, Hawaii, and the Pacific.

Regional winners (there are 13 U.S. regions and an International category) move on to national competition this summer.

Congratulations to our friends at KAZU and to the whole kusp.org team!

photo credit: Steve Laufer

On Friday March 27 Johnny Simmons will host his final broadcast of Morning Edition on KUSP, ending a 20-year run as the voice our listeners wake up to on weekday mornings. Johnny retires after 35 years on KUSP’s professional staff, longer than any employee in our history, and a record unlikely to be broken.

Johnny’s history with KUSP reaches back even further, to our public radio infancy in the 1970′s; he volunteered at this station in that era, when he also worked at some of the best-remembered radio stations in this part of California. Wallace Baine wrote a little bit about Johnny’s grand radio odyssey when he introduced the And J.D. Hillard’s interview with Johnny for kusp.org is here.

Not many of us at KUSP are “radio lifers” — the population of the station has always consisted primarily of volunteers, meaning that as much as they love radio, most of the folks at the station have (or had, before retiring) real jobs concurrently with the time they spend with us. And for the most part, the people in our paid workforce came to public radio after establishing a career in another field; print journalism, museums, technology, construction and real estate… just for openers.

In contrast, radio broadcasting and Johnny are inseparable. And looking back at the 38 years I’ve been hanging around one radio station or another, I’ve known no one I’d rather wake up to on the clock radio, or say hello to after coming through the studio door to start my work day, than Johnny.

Though the regular morning shift draws to a close tomorrow, I really hope our airwaves haven’t seen the last of Johnny Simmons.

Next Monday, Alex Burke moves in to the Morning Edition host chair, and I hope you’ll join me in wishing her a long and productive tenure in the role!

On Monday, November 17, KUSP and all the other NPR stations in America will debut a slightly different version of .

In radio jargon, a “clock” is the hourly pattern of newscasts, feature stories, traffic and weather, and other things you hear. The clock makes it possible for stations to mix local news with the national broadcast in line with the needs of their community and the resources of the station. Every station does it a little differently.

The pattern for the different segments of Morning Edition supplied to us by NPR has not changed in decades (the show just celebrated its 35th birthday; the first broadcast was on November 5, 1979). While we have added and changed our own Morning Edition content steadily since the program came to KUSP in 1984, the NPR elements have not adapted with the times.

Last year NPR started a research project with a sample group of listeners nationwide to see how best to update the format of the show. Much negotiation with stations and other public radio producers ensued. On Monday you’ll hear the results of that work.

The most important finding was that listeners are, generally speaking, involved in a pretty massive multi-tasking effort while they listen to Morning Edition. People also have less time to take in the day’s news than was probably true 35 years ago.

On this side of the radio transmitter, local stations like KUSP have more capacity to cover the news in their area than they used to, and there are many regional and statewide news partnerships (such as and Capital Public Radio News) able to furnish top-quality coverage to compliment NPR’s strength at the national and international level.

For those reasons, the new clock provides more frequent newscasts – from the NPR newsroom in Washington and from our newsroom in Santa Cruz. The KUSP newscasts will include reporting from this area and the state coverage from Capital Public Radio News in Sacramento. The longer, more in-depth reporting from NPR that is the signature sound of public radio news stays – there’s no intention of dropping down to the 20-second story length that is typical for commercial all-news radio. This will be true for our longer stories about California news as well; you’ll hear those on The California Report at about ten minutes before six and ten minutes before eight, as you do now, and in stories by KUSP reporters at various times outside our short newscasts.

The times for some KUSP-produced features will change – for now, not very much, but if you have your alarm clock set to go off exactly when we start a feature like Life In the Fast Lane with Kelly O’Brien or our community commentary, First Person Singular, you might need to adjust those settings a little.

The changes to the clock, as I said, are prompted by gaining a deeper understanding of what public radio listeners want to hear in the early morning. In the next few months that information will inform more changes to how KUSP presents the news… but we’re taking this in stages, as opposed to changing everything all at once.

There will be less obvious changes to the clock for the other news programs NPR provides to KUSP – and

The changes to these programs have come with a lot of thought, and while any change at all can throw a person out of a long-established routine, in the long run we hope they will enable us to give you the news in a way that fits the life we lead a little better. If you have any thoughts about the new news lineup on KUSP, please share them with me.

Tom Magliozzi of Car Talk.
Photo credit: Richard Howard

Next weekend we will bring you the first broadcast of “The Best of Car Talk,” which will be a lot like the program our listeners have been enjoying for the past couple of years (since the brothers semi-retired and stopped adding new listener calls to the 25 year archive they had on hand).

Car Talk arrived on KUSP’s airwaves in the spring of 1988, and has been one of our most-listened-to programs ever since. There’s been no drop-off in listening that we can measure, or in support from our membership, since the switch to calls from the archives. Having said that, we recognize (as do the producers of Car Talk and NPR’s management) that we’re entering different territory now, and I hope you’ll share with me how you feel about “The Best of Car Talk” after listening to a few shows.

KUSP’s mission is to inform, engage and entertain our community. Car Talk, in its unique way, has always done all three of those things. I hope you can help us gauge whether that will still be true as the show moves forward without Tom.

A few days ago we received news of the passing of one of KUSP’s founding fathers. Jeb Henley was one of the first people to assume a leadership role for KUSP programming shortly after the station went on the air in 1972. He left KUSP in 1976, but in that relatively brief time established a programming foundation that distinguished us from many community radio stations at the time – and enabled us to succeed while many of our peers floundered.

Jeb Henley; photo courtesy Don Mussell

Public radio stations started by community organizations frequently struggle with the tension between “quality” and “creativity,” or “consistency” and “individuality.” Community-owned stations typically wrestle with this more intensely than stations owned by local or state government, or by colleges and universities.

From the outset KUSP wanted to offer as many community members as possible access to the airwaves. In the lore of the station, Jeb was about the first KUSP person to make the point that the radio we created had to have high enough quality standards to be appealing to listeners – otherwise, we would never have very many regular listeners, and thus lack the level of community support we needed in order to survive.

Comments I’ve seen from long-time KUSP people suggest that Jeb’s standards sometimes chafed on the volunteers, but were worthwhile in retrospect. Lance Linares, who was a program host at the time and moved into KUSP management after Jeb moved on from the station, said this: “I have to say that KUSP would have never existed without Jeb. And like it or not, he maintained an aesthetic (rigid though it might have been) that was essential in attracting all of us, and opening a helluva lot of ears.”

For his work building KUSP’s programming foundation, Jeb was recognized as one of the station’s first Lifetime Members many years ago. I’m sorry that his time with all of us has come to an end. We have no information as yet about any kind of memorial event, but we will share anything we learn in the future.

 
This -esque headline refers to the legacy KUSP’s Dale Owen leaves the Monterey Bay area and the world. This weekend we and are taking note of Dale’s foresight and community spirit — qualities we hope we and Dale can inspire others to embrace.

Dale was among the most influential personalities in the entire history of KUSP. I noted just a few of his accomplishments in a post to this blog at the time of his passing, which was about a year ago.

Soon after we learned how deeply committed Dale was to fostering positive change in the world. Community Foundation CEO Lance Linares (another major figure in KUSP’s history, and a good friend of Dale for decades) of how Dale managed his personal finances with characteristic foresight — including making an estate plan that supports and advances the causes he cared about.

I can’t tell you how honored and humbled I am that KUSP was one of five nonprofit organizations that are beneficiaries of Dale’s planned giving. Two of his five causes focus their work in the place Dale called home for the last thirty-plus years of his life; three do work with worldwide impact. That local-to-global perspective is also so characteristic of Dale.

In recent years, public media has benefited to a greater and greater extent from estate planning by our supporters. The most visible, and probably most consequential, was the gift from the estate of Joan Kroc that among other good works established the — and, importantly, seeded a significant endowment at her local NPR station, in San Diego.

But planned gifts of all sizes have had meaningful impact. At KUSP, we’ve received several bequests in my time with the station. Most have provided general operating support for the station, as Dale’s will, but other gifts have supported specific things we do. One planned gift met the costs of bringing our audience one year of the donor’s favorite program on our station. Another was designated for the tools our news reporters use to gather audio in the field.

The is a great resource for people in Santa Cruz County and vicinity to learn more about estate planning in general, and how you can take steps today to make good things happen in the years to come. At our station we also benefit from the great work being done at neighboring community foundations, including the , the , and the . Just about anywhere you are in the U.S. there is a community foundation that enhances and focuses local philanthropy in their area.

Community Foundation Santa Cruz County has a pretty good slogan: “For Good. For Ever.” It applies pretty well to Dale Owen’s legacy too.

Summer is typically a season where donations to KUSP slack off a bit. So before summer arrives, we manage that situation in a variety of ways, depending on how our various sources of revenue are doing from year to year. Long-time listeners might remember that the station used to do a fund-raising auction in late May and early June — which we had to discontinue when many of our sources of donated goods and services dried up at the start of the economic downturn. That meant the auction translated to a large investment in time, effort, and money, without much net revenue in return — not something you want when it comes to fund-raising.

As we looked at the budget this spring we decided the least-disruptive thing we could do to shore up the station’s finances was a short on-air membership drive, which we broadcast from May 28 through mid-day on May 31. I’m happy to say that in that time we received gifts from over 350 donors, totaling over $29,000. These totals were in line with our goals for the campaign; a little over goal in terms of the number of gifts, a little under (but only by a couple thousand dollars) in terms of dollars raised.

One of the nice things about the outcome is that we attracted a significant number of contributors who had not made a gift to KUSP before. If we’re able to keep these new contributors as financial supporters in future years, the value of the campaign to KUSP over the long term will far exceed the (very welcome) amount of money we will put in the bank this month as our donors follow through with the pledges they made last week.

Thank you to everyone who played a part in this success — our volunteers, our very hard-working staff, and everyone who made a gift!

This morning NPR announced that , effective July 1.

Mohn’s media career has been rich and varied. He started as a radio DJ in the late 1960′s, with the air name of Lee Masters, and segued into management — joining MTV in 1986 as their General Manager. In the 1990′s he started the E! cable network and later became part of the leadership at John Malone’s , one of the most influential companies in the evolution of American media, especially the cable industry.

More recently he’s become an important part of the public media community in southern California as a volunteer leader and strategic philanthropist. He has served for 12 years as a board member of , and is currently their Board Chair. He also serves on the Board of Councilors of the .

I don’t believe any previous NPR CEO has come from the ranks of station volunteer leadership… and I think that’s terrific news, as the manager of an NPR station that puts so much emphasis on volunteer participation. And the sometimes-byzantine nature of public radio governance, which has baffled many people who join our ranks partway through their career, should be no challenge for someone who was involved at Liberty Media — one of the most complicated corporate creatures in the history of the media business.

Finally, this marks the continued shift in public radio influence away from it’s historical axis in the northeast (from Boston to Washington) and towards California. Paul Haaga, Jr., who has served as NPR’s interim CEO since last fall, is also from southern California, and Howard Wollner, who chairs the NPR Foundation (the network’s fund-raising and philanthropic arm), lives in Sonoma County. California stations are among the most-listened-to and most innovative in the public radio system. And of course, NPR now originates part of Morning Edition and the weekend broadcasts of All Things Considered from the NPR West production center in Culver City.

I look forward to meeting Jarl and reporting my impressions of him to you.

Today the Radio Television Digital News Association announced the regional winners of the . KUSP, I’m happy to say, has two wins this year!

kusp.org earned an award for best broadcast affiliated Web site. The Water Squeeze, our ongoing series explaining Monterey Bay area water planning, was recognized for continuing audio coverage of a major developing issue.

I’m very pleased the judges recognized what’s been achieved by the community volunteers and professional staff who collaborate on kusp.org –and we are grateful for the high-level peer recognition for The Water Squeeze, one of our many reporting initiatives at KUSP and one we’re especially proud of.

The awards highlight the steady growth of KUSP’s efforts to meet the information needs of the Monterey Bay area and keep up with how Monterey Bay area residents get their news.
“The Murrow Awards honor journalism at its finest,” said Mike Cavender, Executive Director of RTDNA. “Local newsrooms serve their communities 365 days a year, and we’re proud to recognize the great work they do.”

The Water Squeeze
KUSP News entered 2013 aware that what happened that year in water planning would affect the region for decades. Indeed, it was the year the Monterey Peninsula seems to have settled on a plan for replacing the Carmel River as its principal source of supply. Decades of planning for a desalination plant in Santa Cruz came to a halt. Meanwhile, techniques for getting the most use out of finite supplies of water have been steadily improving, and hundreds of innovators in groups like the are bringing new ideas to water re-use. Our ongoing Water Squeeze series provides a valuable resource for understanding these issues.

This was our first major reporting initiative that incorporated ideas from American Public Media’s . Using PIN techniques, KUSP reporters determined our reporting could be of the most use to our audience if we provided a way to understand how water is currently supplied along with details about what planners were considering and what different approaches might entail.

J.D. Hillard, Wes Sims, Hannah Weikel, Melissae Fellet, Danielle Venton, and Bonnie Jean Primbsch have all done great work in creating our coverage of The Water Squeeze and I’m really happy they can enjoy this recognition.

kusp.org
Every day kusp.org offers up current news from NPR along with Monterey Bay area reporting by our reporters and the highest quality conversation and interview shows on the radio in the region. A visitor can choose between a story on the latest events in the Ukraine, an in-depth look at the decisions affecting our water supply, discussions on health with or hours of classical, jazz and other music. In an environment in which audiences keep adjusting to improve their access to media, kusp.org has kept up in a way that compares to large-market TV and radio station sites. Our Director of New Media and kusp.org, Steve Laufer, has been leading this team since 2002 and I’m absolutely thrilled to see Steve get credit at this level for what he and his colleagues have accomplished.

About the Murrow Awards
RTDNA says 2014 was among the most competitive year in the group’s history, with over 4,000 news organizations competing for 661 awards. Large-market and small-market stations compete separately for the Murrow Awards. 88.9 KUSP shares the company of Pasadena-based in the Website category and San Francisco in the continuing coverage category.

The annual Murrow awards honor news organizations for outstanding achievements in electronic journalism. According to RTDNA, recipients demonstrate the spirit of excellence that Murrow established as a standard for radio and television journalism as well as the electronic media that have followed. KUSP was considered among news organizations working in television, radio or digital media in the smaller markets of California, Nevada, Hawaii and Guam. Winners of regional awards will compete for nationwide awards which will be announced in June.